Name: Closing the Books Faster: What Leading Teams Are Doing Differently
Uploaded: 2026-01-22T17:16:10.334Z
Duration: 55 min 56 s
Description: Closing the Books Faster: What Leading Teams Are Doing Differently

Transcript for "Closing the Books Faster: What Leading Teams Are Doing Differently": Hello, everyone. We're gonna give everybody a couple minutes, to join here before we get started. I hope everybody is having a good Thursday. We're almost at the end of the week here. This is gonna be our first webinar for IMbirth of the year 2026, so exciting to have everybody and excited to dive into our content. And I do see some people joining us, so we'll just give it a little bit longer, and then I'll kick us off. Alright. Let's go ahead and get started. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Again, this is our first webinar of the year, so very exciting. For those that don't know me, my name is Taylor Decourt. I'm on the North American events team here at Emburse and your host for today's webinar. Our webinar today is closing the books faster, what leading teams are doing differently. Just a few housekeeping items before we get started. This session is being recorded. A copy of the recording will be emailed to you twenty four hours after the event ends. To the right, you'll find the engagement section with several tabs full of goodies. Under the docs tab, we've curated some additional resources relevant to today's material, so definitely check those out. You'll also find the Q and A tab next to the Docs tab there. Please feel free to submit any and all questions here. We encourage you to submit these throughout the webinar, and we'll do our best to address them before our session ends. Chat is also available today, so feel free to engage with us and your fellow webinar attendees. One other thing that I want to announce is under the docs tab, you'll see our webinar subscription program. This is new to imburse. So if you are unfamiliar, definitely check that out. Our webinar subscription program does allow you to get automatically registered for all future imburse webinars. If you are unable to join us live, we also provide you with the recording, so it's a great way to stay in touch. And I know that some of you have been asking for that, so we're glad to have this as an offer now. And with that, let's go into what we'll cover today. So today, in our agenda, we'll start by talking about why closing the books feels harder every year, and where expense processes tend to slow things down. Then we'll look at what leading finance teams are doing differently, and how they're using AI to remove manual work, strengthen controls, and surf and surface issues easier earlier in the close process. From there, we'll walk through practical best practices and show how imburse expense intelligence supports a faster, more controlled close. We'll wrap up with time for questions and discussions at the end, so definitely take advantage of that q and a tab. And before I introduce our lovely speaker for today, we do like to often start our imbursed webinars with a poll question. So our first poll question here is gonna be around how confident are you in your current close process? And I'll go ahead and I'll actually open up that poll for you all. So next to the chat option, you should now see a poll tab. Go ahead and submit your answers there. I see some of us are already taking advantage of that chat. Go ahead and, instead of submitting your answers in the chat, you should have that poll tab open now. And I'm gonna share these answers as they're coming in. Good news. We have a pretty confident group here. I love to see it. We have some that are slightly confident. Good great news is none are are answering not confident. So, hopefully, we we've done this a couple times. We're we're good in our close process, but we're gonna get hopefully, the goal is to get all of you into that very confident space, and talk about how you can boost that confidence a little bit more, with some of our best practice tips here. And I'm gonna give it about ten more seconds, and then I'll close out our poll question, and we'll move on. Alright. I'm gonna go ahead and close this. And now that we have that poll session or that poll question out of the way, I'm gonna invite Brett to join me on stage and introduce our speaker today. Taylor. Ah, Right? there he is. Hi, Hi, Brett. Welcome. Taylor. I'm so pleased to have Brett Chanel here. He is our new VP of global presales at Imbursed. Brett works closely with finance teams to solve complex business and technical challenges, helps translate real world needs into scalable high impact solutions. We're very fortunate to have him. And with that, I'll go ahead and actually turn it over to him so he can introduce himself a little bit better. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Terry. Great to be here. Welcome, everybody. We have an exciting topic today. So, yeah, I lead our global presales team, which was really, if I can make this as simple as possible, I have the fortunate pleasure of working with a lot of great individuals that are extremely knowledgeable, both not only in our software, but our industry. We work with our customers, partnerships every day. It's actually very, very, very exciting, and we do this across the globe. So been in been in technology really my whole entire career. Been in presales in various forms for probably the last eighteen years or so, and very happy to be at Inverse. And this is a really great topic to, to jump right into. I was thinking of something, Taylor. Sorry if I I'm I'm literally gonna go off script immediately. I was looking at this poll the poll questions, but I think it's very interesting. And I think a follow-up question for it would be how happy are you with your close? You know, you're confident in your processes, but are you happy with your processes? And and are there, are there ways to make them better? And we're gonna dive into that today. Alright. So let's let's start tackling this. Right? Let's start, looking at the topic for today is, and setting setting the problem statement here. Why why is the close of the year feel why does it feel harder and harder every single year? It seems like it kinda keeps getting harder. And and there's a there's a lot of things that attribute to this. Now I think the first one, if we go left to right, faster timelines, this is this is pressure that is put on anybody in every company doing anything, really. Right? And every company is always looking to do things faster. Right? We always want faster timelines. Great, you did a great job last year. How can we do it better this year? So speed is always of the essence with anything. And that really is true with our financial teams and especially close of the year. And it's funny to say faster timelines are close of year because there is a certain date where you do really have to be done. So timelines are really forefront of mind. Now higher accuracy and expectations, and you're going to see as we go through these, one affects the other. We have also an expectation of being extremely accurate, more and more accurate. Now this is, again, it's an expectation of the team. Of course, we want to be accurate. That's almost like not, you know, not worth even saying. Of course we want to be accurate. That's a no brainer. Right? But if we look at the third one that we have more expense data, more expense data really starts affecting both the faster timelines as well as the higher accuracy. So most teams think, hey, look, I have more and more access to data. Most companies do. Right? Access to data, I would say in the most probably five, six, seven years has been very prevalent. Right? With the advent of having companies having data lakes and more access today and being able move data around more easily means that we have more access to to data. But how does that affect our expense teams? Well, if we have more access today, oh, boy, we should be able to do things much quicker. Right? We should have more accuracy. However, access to data doesn't always translate into having higher accuracy. Depends on where that data came from. Depends on how clean that data is. Depends on what data is. Do you know? And more data might mean that you have to pour through more data, okay? And this leads us to our last, which is tighter controls. So I think every year when we look at closing our books out and we look at expenses and staying within policy, it's going to be a lot of this topic here today is how do we stay within policy, you're going to see that the more data that we have, the more we can learn, right, the more visibility that we can have, which means the more that we can actually start putting more things in place. Because if we put more things in place, the idea of catching more, you know, and having tighter policies and knowing where to, you know, close and expand within those parameters, the goal there is is that we can save more money. Right? Expense leakage, right, is obviously something that we're always, very cognizant of. And so you can see why does it feel, you know, harder every year? Well, because we do have the pressure going faster. But these all work together. If you have tighter controls, how can you go faster because there's more things to And how can we be accurate? We have more tighter controls. There's more things to check, right? These things start to snowball. And again, the feeling that our finance teams feel at the end of the year is really a lot of pressure, right? More so, obviously, than throughout the rest of the year. So let's dive into some of the things that attribute to why is the end of the year close, where does this break down, and really what are the implications of it. So first and foremost, if we look at let's always go with traveler. It's something that I'm familiar with. I've been traveling for eighteen years, so I've done my share of submitting expenses. May have been guilty of doing it late. May have gotten my hand slapped. Very sorry, I didn't do it this year, so inverse I did not get yelled at. Got my expenses in in a reasonable time. But late or incomplete expense submissions really is one of the biggest culprits. Right? And so people are very busy towards the end of their fiscal year, especially when that's coupled with the end of the calendar year, that this is something they can always put off. Right? Oh, I really have to get that expense in. I am busy today. Boy, I'm slammed with meetings. Right? And so what you see is late or incomplete, expense submission is a really big thing. Obviously, this is, again, maybe a no brainer. How does that affect our financial teams? Well, the later you get it in, the more this is going to stack up. And the more people that weigh, it stacks up and stacks up and stacks up. Now, what happens here is a little bit of a human nature. The later that you do these things, the more you probably are rushing through it. Right? The more that you're probably scrambling to find receipts, you're scrambling to go do you know, find all the right things. Or maybe it's not in the right category, but I think that's right. Oh, there's an exception, but maybe they'll let me go buy so there's all of these things. What happens, first and foremost, is, you know, someone is going to be auditing. Somebody's gonna be need to improve. And and so you start this, and and and we're we're gonna hit on this a lot today. Boy, the expensive, nature of going back and forth, right, to resolve issues between finance and and the employee, it is very costly. Right? There is a lot of hours spent just trying to resolve issues. Okay? This is actually one of the main culprits of of the amount of of money that is expended by most companies. It's actually resolving these issues. And these issues are get stemmed again from our first part. Be because we are in a rush, we put it off. Boy, that trip was a month ago. I don't know where this was, and is this receipt the right receipt? Did I put it in right? And so this rushing nature makes leads to mistakes when it leads to this this chasing down, to find you know, to make sure we have the right supporting evidence, to support the the expense. And then we start getting, obviously, now that we have this data in, what are the exceptions? Right? We start talking about policy already. Policy, again, is something that is usually evolving year after year after year, again, with greater insight. But now that we have those exceptions, again, same type of thing. Well, now we have this exception. We are not you went over budget with this. No. We do not do alcohol or something like that. Right? So you have all these policy exceptions over there, and you have to resolve them. Now, you know, nobody wants to resolve exceptions in us in a expense report on December 30. Right? That was those hastily put in. Right? So, again, the burden on the finance team is, wow, the clock is ticking and look at all of the things that I have to go and resolve. And we'll dive deeper into how, teams actually react to this. The last part of this, if you think about it, I was thinking about an analogy this morning of what it must feel like to be a finance team at this, you know, the time of year of end of close and this rush of, expense reports that that come in, they don't have visibility into what's coming. Right? So they don't have typically. Right? Typically, they do not have this visibility of how much is going to be coming in. And so I was thinking of this analogy. They're it's like they're sitting in a room with just one door, no windows, and there's a line of people out the door, they have no idea how long the line is. They have no idea how long the line is. It it could be three people. It could be 300 people. Right? So they have very limited visibility to be able to understand how much they do have to reconcile. So again, all of this tees itself up to that our finance teams really are put on in a bad place because of the nature of the time of year and these obstacles that our employees have, right, to be able to get accurate expenses in. So if we look a little bit at the life cycle, so if you look at the month of close, what does it look like? Right? Early in the month, these are these are usually easy. Right? And again, not to get into the psychology of it, but maybe the the employees, I'm gonna take care of it early, get it in early, be able to take my time, be very accurate, make sure that I have everything. So the impact is slow. They usually can, you know, they can take the volume, the finance team can take the volume of it. The issues are not very big. They might be small, things like that. So we're easily able to run through that. But as we move towards, the end, so we start getting in the middle, well, now we start getting a little bit. Right? Maybe it's maybe it's December 15 and, oh, boy, I've really gotta get this in. I'm only maybe you're taking time, you know, family and friends, obviously, during that time of year. Well, I really gotta get that in. So issues start stacking up a bit. Right? So you start seeing this volume. And then at close, right, issues surface way too late. Right? So now we are seeing these issues at the close of the year. Right? So the pressure is in is enormous. And, you really have to I always think of our finance teams at this time of year why I I do get mine in early, or at least I try to. Right? Is because of the pressure that this puts on them. So you have all of this cleanup. Now finance seems this is not the only thing that they're doing, if you didn't obviously know. They're not just sitting around just just only processing expense reports. Right? They're doing many, many other things, and this is something that really compounds, the pressure that they're feeling that they have to go through these these processes to be able to get this done. So this cleanup kinda replaces analysis that they might want to do for the year, right, of visibility or looking back in the year, things that they have to be prepared for for the beginning of year, things like that, right? Which brings us to really a great stat. So if you are are in finance, you already know this. But if you if you're not, the pressure of of finance teams to to cut spend is is increasing. Right? And so if you if you look at the inverse AI spend, it's a paradox report that we put out. Right? On average, we're looking at about a 65 vendor cut. Right? So that that spend so what that means is, again, not just doing expense reports. They're also tasked with, hey, are we using any of the platforms to to its fullest? Right? Is there a full adoption of this, you know, maybe software program or something like that or not? And they have to make hard decisions on this. Right? And so, you know, there's less flexibility, there's fewer tools, there's fewer resources to go around to be able to do these other end of year tasks, again because they're putting so much pressure on themselves to be able to close the books and get them out. So so let's take a a little bit of a step and, and and look at more of, I think, the traditional approach, probably what most, companies are doing. And then let's look at a a new way or a newer way or a better way, I should say, of being able to close out the year. So first off, the traditional approach. Right? You're basically looking at issues again being discovered at close. Okay? Not proactive. Right? So you're looking at issues at close. Most of the follow ups, it's a manual process. Okay? It is a an email. It might be a phone call. It might be a Slack or a Teams message. Right? Back and forth, back and forth. Hey. You know, there's an issue with this. And then and then there's, another approval process. Hey. You know, there this is out of compliance. Do you approve of it? Yes. Okay. And this person has to approve it and it goes up the line. Right? It's a very manual process. So there's a lot of last minute adjustments. And again, we keep going back to there's limited visibility. Right? So it's just traditional approaches. We're just going to keep working off the pile and having this manual way of reconciling and getting into the end. Let's just hope it's this year is not a bad year. Right? Let's hope it's not a crazy year and everybody's good. Right? Now so that's more of a traditional approach. Now teams, that are adopting, I would say, a better approach, utilizing technology, we're going to get in how technology actually fosters and enables this new approach. They want to address, issues early. Okay, so this is going to be a theme of what we're going to be talking about, of being able to address issues early, not at close, not at submission, early, right? And we're gonna do this for a number of different ways. It has to do with automating manual processes, automating manual data input, things like that. We're gonna talk about that. That we can go ahead and put those policies or those controls. We can do this upstream, okay, not at the auditing team, the finance, either approval team. We're not putting it there. We're going to put this upstream. And it has a massive effect on the ability to be able to close in a smooth, accurate manner each year. It also provides ongoing visibility. And so again, we talked about that analogy of sitting in a room with a door and we don't know how many people are out there. Well, this also now will give clarity. We do know what is out there. We do have clarity of the type of things that are going to come our way. And so leading teams really, I think the themes here, instead of being so reactive to things, we can start using this word of proactive. And the reason behind that is that we can understand that these these issues earlier. We can automate things, processes, and it's not a manual manual, user experience. Right? And then we can also have, obviously, this visibility. So if we look at, you know, very simply, right, you I think this this slide is just very, very, very clear. Right? So you can do either your cleanup at close, okay, where you really have all of these manual ways of doing it that we've been describing, or you can have early prevention. Right? So you're either scrambling to fix issues at close, or, you know, the the, I think the scenario that you want is to be able to close with smoothness and clarity, right, and accuracy. So we're gonna talk about accuracy as well. So really from, you know, now that we understand, you know, what, our financial teams are really facing, right, we understand what they're facing right now. But we also now, hopefully everybody in the audience here knows what is possible and really what the future is going to be for our financial teams at close. Believe so we have another fun poll question. So I'm going shoot this back over to Taylor. Yeah. We're gonna go ahead and, open up our second poll here. So I'll go ahead and do that now for us. But, our we're asking you all what slows down, your close the most. And this is a multi select, so you can choose more than one answer. Again, to submit those answers, you should now have that pull tab open and available again. But your options here are missing receipts, policy exceptions, manual reviews, late expense submissions, or other. If you select that other option, I will encourage you to throw that other in the chat because we're curious to hear what that is. And I'll share these results as well, as they're coming in here. So, Brett, you can you can see these two. Looks. like you can see my hand gestures. I'm like, yep. Yeah. Look at that across the board. Sure. Yep. yeah. Late expense submissions. Brett, you're the number one culprit. We we gotta. change that. I I know. I'm getting better. It's. okay. I'm gonna be honest. It's a problem everybody struggles with. It is. But, They're really yeah. thankfully, there are solutions in place. And, Brett, the longer you're here with us at imburse, the better we'll get you about that. I'm the right company to be Yes. to have better behavior. I will tell you that. Yes. Yeah. It's unacceptable. We're gonna go ahead and close this poll, though. So let's get, let's get that closed out, we can continue talking about how we can actually, improve some of those pain points and dive into some solutions here. So I'm gonna, go ahead and hand it back over to Brett, and you. let him carry on. Thank you. Yes, I like the one. The approvers are on vacation. Yes, that is one as well. That's a very good one. That, again, people love to. I do, too. Enjoy, again, if your fiscal year ends at the end of our calendar year, it's time to spend with friends and family, typically. And so people are just itching to take some time, well deserved, I should say, time off. So that's a very good one. I like that one. Okay. So let's jump into probably my favorite topic and I could Taylor would probably give me a quick message. I could talk about this for hours on end. But how does AI support a faster close? Right? So how does how does AI enable this, you know, promised land that I was describing before? So how we get there, right? And again, I want to make sure everyone knows this is not just theoretical. This is what we have in market today to be able to help our financial teams have a much better end of the year close. So let's start talking about AI. So first, let's apply AI in the sense of our our our typical workflow that that we might have or, the the lifespan of of an expense or something like that of that nature. And then we can get actually get into the technology of how that happens. So first and foremost, right, we want to reduce manual entry. We talked about this automation automation. It's it's such an overused but most important probably word. AI is fantastic at replacing manual work. And what I mean by that, and and and we'll talk about it a little bit as well, being intentional of how you use AI. This is not to replace people's jobs or anything like that. It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with automating tasks that are really not valuable. Right? It is taking you know, you're taking people away from what you want them to be concentrating on, and you're having them doing manual things. And this has to do with, manual data entry. And I gotta say, you know, coming to this industry, you know, a lot of it, the systems or their older systems, they're based off of how do you type in data efficiently. You know, I I like I said, I've been a traveler for eighteen years, and it was okay. You know, it's easy to type in all my expenses and calories, things, all that stuff like that. So first, AI reduces manual entry. It is fantastic at it. Right? It is fantastic at being able to take data, get it, and get it into the system. And let's be honest, that is probably one of the most tedious things that that people have to go through is actually just getting the data in the system. It's not fun, which is why we put off doing our expenses until the end of the year and we make our financings very angry with us. Again, not guilty. Then the first part And then the next part is submission, right? So once have the data in, AI is also fantastic at applying those policies and those checks and looking at the data for accuracy for anything that, again, is out of policy and being able to, recognize that. Right? And so last and then we then we go to step three. So AI flags issues very early. Okay? So, again, if we can get data in, we can get it in accurately, right, we can put those checks on that and make sure they're adhered to policy. If they are not, right, we can go ahead and flag. And this is the most important part, I think, when when people look at AI is how does it support your responsibilities and not replace responsibility? So we always wanna have that, that human oversight in there, but having those manual processes is really not valuable. Making sure that the human is in there for the decision making, right, and the approval, things like that. And so that has to do with being able to raise issues, accordingly. And then we've talked about reporting. We've talked about visibility and not having it. Okay? So having AI, right, being able to get data, recognize the data, get it into the system, all these different things. Well, now we have all of this data already in the system. Right? So we can provide visibility, and finance teams are not blindsided with what's coming. Now the last part, right, is throughout all of this, it will it compounds itself to having a faster close. And speed is not just the only metric that we're looking at, right? So we wanna make sure we have accuracy, right? So it's not just fast. We wanna be very accurate. We wanna have a really great experience, right, to be able to do it so it's not an annoying experience. We wanna make sure that we have visibility, clear points. We can always do these type of things. So all of these kind of go together, and AI is what really is powering this. I would say it's it's a it is a transformational, technology that that really, again, at Inverse is the center, the cornerstone of how we are developing our software because we know the capability that AI brings, this space. So let's keep let's keep diving a little bit, deeper. So where does AI matter the most? I'm gonna start at the bottom. So if we look at the life cycle of this receipt capture, I think the first and second ones are the most important ones because it actually allows the the, the top two to keep going. So first off, receipt capture. Let's be simple about this. OCR, if you don't know, optical character recognition, it will pull data off of a picture, basically. Right? So you're taking you'd be able to pull it off. AI understands context. Right? This is important. Right? So it's not just that we're pulling data off, we understand the context of it. You know? So we can easily be able to put it down and it goes to the next phase of this. If we can get it out accurately, understand the context of it, we can categorize it. Okay? So we can go ahead and take all the line items and put them in, this is dinner, this is this, right, this is a cab, all these different things. We can go ahead and clearly get it into the system. These two are, I think, are some of the most important because it allows us to have the next two. So, again, if I can get data automated, right, just by taking a picture and getting it in and getting it categorized, and it's accurate, now my policy enforcement is something that now we can also automate. I can go ahead and apply rules on it, and I trust it because I know that the accuracy is so high. So I know that this data is good, and I can apply AI to it to be able to do this policy enforcement there and understand the exceptions that are there. And then the last part is, okay, let's surface it. Right? So, again, we're applying, how can we go ahead and surface all these anomalies and things that that we have much sooner in the process. But you can see how AI really, applies itself in each four of these stages, and they kind of build on each other. But again, if you don't have accurate receipt caps, you don't have categorization, it's hard to do the other two, or at least trust the other two. So, again, it I've been traveling for years. I've used some other software as well. Really, AI powered capture receipt receipt capture, excuse me, was backwards, is nothing more than taking a picture. And and really what we're doing is moving towards a touchless experience where there really isn't much more than than taking your phone and holding it over the top of a receipt. Right? And being able to do that, it will go ahead and recognize receipt and pull everything out and categorize it. It really isn't much more than that. Okay? And then from once you do that, it's it's on its way, and we can apply again all of those policy exceptions and things like that. And so when we look at, the accuracy of this, right, so again, because the accuracy is first and foremost, you have to have the accuracy or all these other things that really, you cannot really depend on. Firstly, then we have the expenses brought in that we categorize it, and it moves down the line to be able to understand and be able to get these issues in early. So we started looking, if you remember several slides back, of what does leading teams what do leading teams do? Well, they they understand exceptions early in the process. They don't they don't have to understand those exceptions at close or at submission. Okay? So if we can go ahead and get accurate data in, we can categorize it, then we can apply policy right then and there. Okay? Right where I'm sitting at the restaurant, for example. If I put a receipt in for dinner, I will know right then and there if whether or not I'm in compliance. Okay? Not a month later after I send it in and then somebody else tells me that it's not. Right? So so very important that we have this in in an early state. So the proactive controls, this prevents the late surprises, okay? As you can tell that we are building down our workflow line of the traveler in our scenario here of getting that receipt in and understanding if they're not in compliance. There's an easy, there's an easy one. If you're in a restaurant, you know, you need an itemized receipt. Well, what if you took a picture of the receipt that was not itemized? Okay. Normally, you would put it in. You wouldn't know that you did it. You just, know, you maybe in a hurry. Okay. Let's go with the cabs outside. We gotta we gotta move. And then a month later, somebody tells, hey. This is the itemized receipt. We don't we don't have everything in there. Well, we will tell you right off the bat, hey. This is not an itemized receipt. Oh, okay. Well, then I'll let me stop. No. Wrong one. Boom. I got it. Just that that small scenario right then and there. Do you know how many hours that saves both the traveler as well as the finance department. Just doing things like that. But there is a lot more scenarios that we can go ahead and and catch. Right? So being able to proactively put these controls and shift it from the end of the cycle to the beginning of that cycle is really, really huge. Now there's other topic in here. If you look at the third bullet point down is virtual cards. So we haven't talked about virtual cards, but virtual cards also allow another level of control. Right? So maybe amount control, what you can spend, things like that. So virtual cards, if you use them, which, is integrated actually into our systems, provides another level of control that you have at point of of capture, right, or a point of sale, you wanna think of it that way. Again, all of it is proactive so that you are not, doing it, at the end of the closing and putting this burden on our finance teams. So there's another topic that we can we can look at too, and and this happens. This is real. Fraud detection. Okay? Sad to say, right, that there, has been a level of fraud that goes into, submitting expenses. It is kind of an evil, right, of that that we have, of dishonesty out there. Right? So some people are purposely putting in, fraudulent receipts. Right? Things that did not happen. It's kind of interesting. AI has a way of generating fake receipts. You know? You you can do that. But as great as maybe AI is making a fake receipt, AI is fantastic at detecting fraudulent receipts as well. Very, very good. So when you really look at, the ability to not just keep things in policy, but actually flag things that, look like they're they're not on the the up and up, you know, that is something that we wanna make sure that we're capturing. We can cut those financial losses by 50%. And I'll tell you, speaking with a lot of companies, this topic is a difficult one. So the decisions that they make are luring at two ends of the camp. Do I spend a lot of money having a big auditing team to be able to catch you know, fraudulent activity as well as being out of policy, things like that, this large team that I have to pay for, right, to be able to do that? Or do I have a very small team and I just assume the loss? Right? And with imbursed intelligence, we expense intelligence, you don't have to make that decision anymore. Right? You don't have to make the decision on whether or not I pay so much upfront or, I just take the loss. We can go ahead and are fantastic at being able to to catch fraudulent activity. So, when we look at all of this together, right, we look at actually one really amazing product that we have, coming to market, actually February 1, which is really, really exciting, is Immersed Assurance. And Immersed Assurance does exactly what we are talking about. Right? So the lack of policy awareness and adoption that we have, we can go ahead and capture those things. And the reason why I bring up lack of policy awareness and adoption, and I'll bring myself, when you're a new employee, do you, oh, did you memorize, you know, all of our policies that we have for for travel? You probably did not. You know? So there is a, you know, a a level of just, you know, I I didn't know that was our policy. Okay? So if you do not have the controls in place to be able to automate putting that in front of the, the user, right, you you will have slip ups. Right? Now, again, when you have that, there's always this concerns of data around we've talked about it around data quality, the integrity of the data. You know, if if you can always replace, manual data input, right, with automated input, you're going to get that accuracy, way back up. And, again, where's the real cost? It's that back and forth that we always see. Right? Is that, okay. Well, we put it in. Now I gotta go call them. I gotta go and mail them things like that. And that is a huge cost. It's a time waster. Right? You really just don't want nobody wants to do it. Finance partners don't wanna do it. I don't wanna do it. Right? Your employees do not wanna do this. They do not wanna have this back and forth. It's distracting. It takes them away from really what their responsibilities are in the organization. And then unoptimized policies, creating inefficiencies, right? This really kind of just goes into the area where, you know, we have these policies, right, that we can't adhere to or we don't have a way of actually enforcing things like that and creating a much more inefficient, again, jamming everything towards the end of the year is really not the right way that we want to be doing this. Okay. So we're starting to get towards the end of this. So let's start wrapping wrapping this in together in the next three slides. Right? So real time visibility. So if you can understand spend trends before they close, you can be more, proactive, I would say, add in. So we can now start using this word. And I'm always curious of talking with, finance teams. And can you use the word proactive or are you always being reactive? Can you look at what happened last year? Yes, of course. But being proactive is very hard to do. If we can get all this data in the system early things like that, we can finally give a visibility of trends, things like that in front of our finance teams early in the and so that they know what they are dealing with. Okay? And they can be proactive about it. Right? They they can actually understand how much is is there and maybe put out communications, things like that. Right? And then, again, this this is me. I hope you are hearing this loud and clear over and over and over again. Issues surfaced early is the key to all of this. Right? If you can go ahead and apply all of your policy and things upfront, right, well before that any expenses are actually submitted, the downstream ramifications of that is enormous. Right? I can't I can't emphasize that enough. And then we have no last minute surprises really is what is really what you wanna get down to. So if we can do all of these things, well, what what does that experience now look like? What does that end of close look like for our financial teams? And and really what we're doing is we're eliminating or really greatly reducing to the point of elimination that we do not have any of these surprises. Really, it's more of just flagging things, saying yes, we've resolved that very quickly and moving on and not having such these manual processes here. So and burst AI expense intelligence. So you want to have real time control. Okay? And and this is one of those where instead of talking about expense processing, right, we wanna start talking about managing spend. Right? And to be able to do that, you need to have real time control of that. You can't, you know, you can't really have, unless you have visibility of what's going on at any given minute and not what went on three months ago, it's hard to have control. It's in the past, right, logically speaking. Right? So being able to have a very the integrated insights that we have, what it really does and again, I'm using that word, proactive, it allows our finance teams to have a lot more agility in how they close out their books, how they resolve issues, the manner in which we do it, and really the amount of effort that it actually takes to do it. Okay? So, if you give that real time control, it allows you to have these insights, allows you to have these visibility. And again, it gives, I think, finance teams something that they've been longing for for quite a long time is to have the agility to be able to resolve these issues. Okay. So in looking at this slide, I'm gonna walk you through this one. There's a lot on this slide here. And so, again, I use this phrase, stop processing expenses and start managing spend. So you can see there's there's several stats on here, right, that that our customers feel when they are are using inverse expense intelligence. Being able to cut down reconciliation from ten ten to one days. I mean, 10 to one. Right? That is a that's not an exaggeration. It is a big, obviously, huge saving. That was nine days savings. Right? That's easy math. Right? And and then we can look at some other. Right? 50% reduction in approval cycles. 52% in reimbursement processing. Okay? So what you know, you obviously, the teams can get through the approval cycle much more fast. Right? Faster. And then the approval, you know, the reimbursement comes through, right? So actually the employee feels it as well. And if we look at the employee, if we go to from left to right in the middle there, let's look at that at the end of the employee experience. Their idea of this is, again, a touchless experience in which we are providing. You just want to be able to take your picture, get it into the expense report, maybe solve anything that was a flag, right, and get it in and get it out. So we want to greatly reduce the time that our employees are spending. So about 45 to 50% savings. Again, you're apply applying this, this AI backed technology to be able to do that. It's more two thousand hours. That is an insane amount of time. Okay? If you think about it, and again, this isn't to you know, I hope no one thinks of this as reducing heck or anything like that. It has to do with taking your valuable employees and allowing them to spend and concentrate their day on what they, provide to that company. What makes them happy. I think many people are happy about doing, you know, their expenses. And a lot of this, obviously, again, I'm gonna say it again, this all has to do with proactively reducing, you know, the risk up front. Okay? If you can reduce all this risk upfront, right, with fewer policy exceptions and things that make it to, again, your audience and your finance team in general. Right? If you can go ahead and reduce that, the amount of time that is spent, go ahead and reconciling and approving things like that, it greatly, greatly reduces. And all of this, again, works together. It's not just one single thing. There's so many different places that all add up into this huge savings that we are seeing. Yeah. Alright. So last couple slides here. So when we think about best practices for reducing our close with AI, the first one, reduce that manual work. You heard me say it when we looked at, you know, receipt capture categorization, right, this movement of data. You want to reduce that manual work. Now reducing manual work does have two two things to it, right? So I want to make sure that we drive this home. It's not just, okay, reduce manual work, don't have to do it, I save time, right? Reducing manual work and replacing it with, AI automated processes, right? It actually, again, it jumps that accuracy up. So it's not just that you're taking the burden off of the employee of having to do, expenses in this case. You're also greatly, you're also greatly, improving the accuracy of doing so. Now, having accuracy, that drives categorization, that drives the ability to have automated policy checking, things like that, right? And it improves our from left to right, again, it improves our visibility, Right? More data that is not accurate data is useless data. Right? So, again, if we can reduce that manual work and we have more accurate data that's going in, now we can rely on that visibility, again, making those finance teams, much more agile, proactively agile. Right? Okay. And then we can apply controls earlier. Again, I think this is probably the seventeenth time I said it, so hopefully you take away and you go, well, I'm going apply all these controls earlier in the cycle. That is where this savings comes. If you go ahead and shift from a burden I wouldn't say burning, but taking all of this work that accumulates, especially at the end of the year, and you can move it and catch it early in the cycle, again, the outcome is enormous. And the way to measure this, is really speed, right? Is, you know, utilize this technology that is so fantastic and how much faster and how much more accurate, how much more clarity visibility do you have at the end of close? Yeah. So my last slide before we get into, any any questions that we have, right, is is really, you wanna be, I would say, very purposeful and intentional about how you are using AI, as well as how your partners and your your vendors understand their architecture, understand how they are using, AI. It's very important to do your your due diligence and understand how they are leveraging support your team. I said it earlier in this webinar. It is here to support your team. It's not to replace, it's not to monitor them. It is to support the things that they are responsible for today. It is reducing those manual tasks. It's to provide a lot more accuracy. Right? It is to take the time away from tasks that you really don't want them doing and back to more value work that they can bring. Right? So we want to be able to reduce that busy work. We want to be able to provide that visibility. And again, the topic for today that I'll leave you with, this is all relates to a faster, smoother close for our finance teams. So I'm gonna leave you with that. We're gonna go to questions. I hope that it was very insightful for people. I thought it was I hope it's thought provoking for everybody. And and, again, I hope you got a lot of value on on really how you can go ahead and and bring this capability to your finance teams to have a faster close. Yes. Thank you, Brett. I we appreciate having you and sharing your wisdom here. We are gonna open it up for some questions. So do get those questions in, and you can submit those in the q and a tab here. We have time to answer just a couple of them. If we don't get to your questions, we will be sure to reach out after as well. Yeah. Yep. So, we do have a question about, notifications and how to set up those notifications during the receipt capture process. So to be alerted early, there are a couple of ways to go about that. So I know from from a user perspective, one of the benefits of having that OCR technology is that we are trying to put the onus back on the user. So we're trying to catch that early, which means that if I submit a receipt that or an expense that is out of policy, it's notifying me as that user and giving me the opportunity to correct that early. Now as an admin, you'll also get notifications as well. But anything outside our standard notifications within our platform, you can also set up workflows for. So we can definitely talk more about what kind of notifications or alerts you need, but we do try to set up standard workflows within our platform to notify and put that onus on the end user in order to catch and rectify that early on. Yep. Yep. Looking at some other questions here, is someone is asking about if receipts should be required for all transactions, And is it worth it to require expenses that are approved in the annual budget to go through an approval workflow when the expense materializes? Brett, do you wanna speak to that a little, bit? and this varies. This obviously varies from company to company. Again, Okay. the ability to implement the policies that that organization is comfortable with. Obviously, it varies by industry. A lot of different factors will will determine. So you have control over that. So first and foremost, before whether it's a should, it's a could, can you? So absolutely, you can go ahead and put in, you know, I need a receipt for a stick of gum. Right? It could be that or it could be sometimes we you know, anything under 25, we don't have a receipt for. So you can go ahead and apply that. Again, depending on the industry is very, it's very specific on what you need to submit expense receipt for. What I'll say is a lot of companies, I think, are moving more towards, yes, apply the receipt. Because it's so easy to put the receipt in. Okay? Before, if you wanted to I don't mean to go too deep into this. If you have a manual process of putting the data in that is on the receipt and you take the picture, the picture is the evidence. You still have to type it all in. Right? And so a lot of policies for for, let's say, like I said, $25 and under. Well, the the math doesn't make sense to have somebody spending their time typing in all that information. Right? You're paying somebody to do that. So the math really doesn't there's kind of a threshold there. Now with it being able to just take a picture and just categorize and gets all the information in there, you know, you're seeing some companies that are actually going down and needing receipts for absolutely everything. So again, Yep. I think it's up to the company and their policies and what they're comfortable with. Yeah. And that does vary. I know that there there's also a question here about, some of the AI technology that we've talked about and how that, aligns with our plans that we offer. So I am gonna encourage that if you guys are interested in learning more about the inverse features and the different plans that we offer and how that's structured, please go under the docs tab. There is an option to learn more about imburse. We'd love to set up time, and connect you with a imburse rep who can best answer those questions because that's also gonna vary by company and what your needs are. So happy to connect, and discuss what solutions are best for you and what tools are available for our different packages there. But the best way to do that is to get connected with a rep. So with that, we only have a couple more minutes, so I am gonna go ahead and launch a quick survey here. If you guys wouldn't mind participating in that as well, you should have access to that survey. It should pop up for you. Please go ahead and fill that out. It's just three quick questions that help us create better webinar experiences for you all in the future. And we'll go ahead and we'll give you all some time to fill that out. But with that, we are gonna go ahead and close out our webinar for today. If we didn't get to your questions, we will go ahead and reach out after this webinar. So we do follow-up with everybody if we we don't get to those today, but we do thank you guys so much for your time. Do keep an eye out for future webinars. We have, an exciting webinar around, I believe our topic for February is gonna be around fraud prevention. So keep an eye out for that. And if you wanna make sure you don't ever miss a webinar, go sign up for that webinar subscription so that you'll get automatically enrolled in that webinar. Perfect.